Travis Jonker is an elementary school librarian in Michigan. He writes reviews (and the occasional article or two) for School Library Journal and is a member of the 2014 Caldecott committee. You can email Travis at scopenotes@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter: @100scopenotes.

I’ll never understand when there are several diversity books out there (being ignored) that the kid-lit world keeps focusing on just a few authors/illustrators. It really comes off as favoritism on these blogs. Maybe a lesson of inclusiveness which from my view is not a part of the kid-lit world and why we keep screwing up in this area.

Wow. As a woman of color (I’m black) I am stunned by this and all the other conversations about this book in particular and diversity in books in general. You’ve all taken a beautiful book that works on many levels for a wide range of readers and demeaned it because why? Oh, that’s right, the author chose to show slaves, ohmyGod, smiling! The horror, the travesty! As Ms. Blackall says in her post, yes slavery was unspeakably horrific but the triumph of the human spirit is such that even in the darkest of times there may be an occasion where for the briefest moment one might find reason to smile. She doesn’t gloss over; you can tell from the pictures that they’re not living an easy life and the two huddled in the cabinet says all that needs to be said. It is a picture book, after all. Would you have preferred she show slaves being whipped while they picked the berries? The book isn’t about slavery it’s about a dessert! That the author felt the need to apologize, to stem the tide of vitriol coming her way most likely, is to me in itself offensive. What I, as a black woman, take from this is that people are upset that black folks were shown feeling happy rather than just beat down. Being black is a struggle but every now and then we’re able to find something to smile about too.

Excerpt:
“Publishers are not thinking enough about who is reading these books,” she added. “Imagine reading ‘A Fine Dessert’ to a classroom in Philadelphia that is 90 percent African-American. How are those kids going to feel?”

Just what kind of information about slavery to present to children, particularly very young ones, is a difficult question. While a few illustrated books, like Tom Feelings’s wordless 1996 volume, “The Middle Passage,” deal bluntly with slavery’s deepest horrors, most titles for children tend to focus on subjects like the Underground Railroad or inspiring tales of enslaved people actively struggling against oppression.

But even heroic stories hold pitfalls. Alvina Ling, the editor in chief of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, recalled intense discussions around the order of the words in the subtitle of “Dave the Potter: Artist, Poet, Slave,” a 2010 picture book about a real former slave from South Carolina who created ceramics inscribed with his verses.

“Even though he was a slave, we wanted him to be seen first as an artist,” Ms. Ling said.

Don Tate, the author and illustrator of “Poet: The Remarkable Story of George Moses Horton,” about a North Carolina slave who taught himself to read and write and in 1829 became the first African-American to publish a book in the South, said in an email that children’s books about slavery needed to show suffering.

About 100 Scope Notes

Children's literature news, reviews and assorted school librarian oddities. Combine one part kid's books, one part school librarianship, a splash of absurdity and you get 100 Scope Notes.

Travis Jonker is an elementary school librarian in Michigan. He writes reviews (and the occasional article or two) for School Library Journal and is a member of the 2014 Caldecott committee. You can email Travis at scopenotes@gmail.com. He's also on...